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Paul Berendt Wittenburg
Lance Corporal Paul Berendt Wittenburg (nicknamed Joseph by his fellow servicemen) was a rogue ODST who led a Spartan killing campaign from 2559 to 2564. One of the first to resettle on Reach after The Emissary's terraforming of it, he created a security breach when he broke into ONI's classified database, most notable Section III's files on the Spartan project. Upon claiming this data and discovering each Spartan's location, Wittenburg began in a terrible duty. Biography Early Life and Upbringing Paul Berendt Wittenburg was born in the Russian Federation in the town of Tchermashnya, to the parents of Ivan and Manya Wittenburg. An only child, he grew up in a relative state of comfort, but was also a consistent reader, always wanting to know more about the outside world. He had two close friends, Dmitri Byelinksky, an aspiring poet and author of stories, who gave Paul the affectionate nickname “Joseph” and AnnaMaria Parangosky, the granddaughter of the infamous Admiral, who provided him exclusive stories on the goings on of the outside world. Joseph planned to pursue a career in law, and potentially segue that into a career in politics. Moving quickly on that track, he quickly exceeded in his studies and by the age of 15 began preparing to move to a new home in Moscow to study at the Lomonosov State University. However, he was rejected in his application to the school due to a controversial paper he wrote in his exam about the threat of the Insurrection, in which he compared the various rebel fronts to the pre-American colonies, and argued that despite their differing backgrounds, they would be sure to ally together in the face of a common enemy. The professors reading over this essay disapproved of this view, as well as worrying that his paper would incite some of the more inflammatory student groups in the school and encourage them to rebellion. Wittenburg was offered locations at several other colleges, but most of them tended to be of a much smaller tier, while the larger universities followed Lomonosov’s example and turned him away. Enlistment Distraught about his situation, Joseph chose to enlist in the armed forces, despite AnnaMaria’s offer to provide him contacts for a job at the Office of Naval intelligence. Adamant about the veracity of his essay, and seeking to prove it, he chose to enlist in the United Earth Space Corps, namely the Reserve, in which potential soldiers were trained while aboard a spacecraft traveling at 99% the speed of light, creating relativistic effects so that they would remain un-aged by the time they arrived in the future. By doing this, Wittenburg felt he could get re-accepted to Lomonosov, as his essay’s predictions would come true and thus they would see him as valuable. After 8 weeks of training, Wittenburg's battalion re-emerged to normal speeds to find that 25 years had passed and humanity was now involved in one of the most desperate wars in their history. Wittenburg's battalion was transferred to Reach for further training as ODST's, but during the time their ship arrived to their location, Reach had already fallen and been subsequently mass-evacuated weeks beforehand. However, soon after they arrived and thus planned to turn back, Wittenburg and the rest of his fellow trainees fell witness to an unimaginable occurrence. Behind the Scenes *Joseph’s birthday, March 09, 2510, coincides with the actual date of his character’s creation, albeit 500 years in the future. *Joseph’s birth name of Paul comes from Paul the Apostle, whose Book of Galatians the author had been doing a report on at the time. *The character of Paul has originally intended to be part of an Ender’s Game fanfic, albeit older and with a different name, but since ODST’s and HEV’s could not be satisfactorily written into the Enderverse, the character was moved over for Halo Fanon.